Captain from Ohio

CAPTAIN SAM GRANT (512 pp.)--Lloyd Lewis--Little, Brown ($6).

When genial, whirlwind Managing Editor Lloyd Downs Lewis emptied out his desk at the Chicago Daily News one day in 1945 and said goodbye to his staff, he was headed for no slippered retirement. Instead he went off to his home in suburban Libertyville, Ill. to get busy on the biggest story of his career: the life of General Ulysses S. Grant.

It was no flash decision. Already the author of a lively biography of William Tecumseh Sherman (1932), Lewis had been collecting research on Grant for a dozen years. At Libertyville, freed from the grind of daily journalism, 54-year-old Lloyd Lewis began to burrow into his mound of notes.

Banging away at his typewriter, sometimes "from 11 a.m. till 2 o'clock at night," Lewis found the age of Grant becoming "incredibly real" to him. "Some days," he wrote, "it seems the only real thing in the world." He made endless journeys to coax new material out of aging heirs and yellowing documents, ended up writing 30 versions of his first chapter before he was satisfied. This week, as Volume I finally appeared, readers had a chance to sample the fine result of Lewis' hard-working devotion, but without hope of reading the rest of the story, at least as Lewis would have written it. By the time Volume I was ready for the publisher, Historian Lewis was dead of a heart attack.

The Problem of Poverty. Captain Sam Grant discovers chubby, two-year-old Ulysses in Georgetown, Ohio, sitting with "chronic composure" when a pistol goes off in his hand. It follows the slight, taciturn young man through the training grounds of West Point and the Mexican War, leaves him a newly commissioned colonel of 39 in the ominous year 1861. Convinced that "biography is not instruction or teaching--but is just a story that happens to be true," Lewis has taken much of the stiffness and the stuffiness out of the Grant legend, and relegated the gossip about his minor vices to their proper place.

Much was to be said and written about Grant's drinking. Toping was common enough in Grant's home town (if a man failed to get drunk at least three or four times a year, he "could hardly maintain his standing in the community, or in the local churches"). But Lewis shows that Grant himself was no habitual drunkard. Married after the Mexican War to Julia Dent, a Missouri plantation belle and the love of his life, Sam Grant was soon separated from her by Army transfer to the gold-struck Pacific Coast. There, among raging prices and get-rich-quick schemes, he saw his hopes of sending for his wife and children dwindle as one spare-time business venture after another flopped. Result: Grant took to drink, in time resigned* his captaincy in the ill-paid Army, which was then losing West Point-trained officers in droves./- Once U.S. Grant, civilian, rejoined his wife on his father-in-law's plantation, he quickly sobered up.

A few years later, in 1857, an officer who remembered Grant from Mexico had the idea of driving out to see his old buddy. Stopping a seedy, mud-spattered farmer in a wagon, he asked the way to Grant's house, got back the answer: "Well, I am he." Cried the shocked officer: "Great God, Grant, what are you doing?" Grant, who sold wood for a living, had a reasonable reply ready: "I am solving the problem of poverty."

Seedling Hints. In his graphic Mexican War battle scenes, the best in the book, Biographer Lewis has won a major technical victory by firmly focusing on Grant while adequately conveying the sound & fury of massed fighting men around him. Throughout his life, Grant detested bloodshed ("I never went into a battle willingly or with enthusiasm"), refused even to hunt animals. "I had a horror of the Mexican War," he once wrote, "only I had not moral courage enough to resign." From the campaigns fought by Mexican War Generals Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor (Grant's military idol), observant Grant shrewdly unlearned some of early 19th Century West Point's rigidified teachings, e.g., the maxim that an attacking force must be at least three times larger than a fortified defending force (U.S. commanders in Mexico repeatedly attacked such forces when outnumbered three, four or five to one).

Planted thick with seedling hints that help to explain Grant's military greatness, Lloyd Lewis' Volume I is biography's richest, most persuasive treatment of Grant's youthful years. As such, it is also profoundly unsatisfying, for it is the end of his work. Behind him Biographer Lewis left a pile of unused research for two or three more volumes.

* In one of the minor ironies of history, Grant's resignation was accepted by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. The path of West Pointer Davis had already crossed that of another coming man: in the Black Hawk War (1832), where he served as a lieutenant of regulars, Davis had administered the oath of allegiance to Captain-of-Volunteers Abraham Lincoln.

/- Among them: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, Fighting Joe Hooker.

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